The team that came up was left confused and immediately shifted into a defensive formation. Weapons drawn. Eyes scanning. They were pretty sure there was no one else other than them still alive at this point. They had seen enough death to know the odds.
"Was it a monster?" asked Zy, crouching to examine the ground near the sleeping spot.
"No," Senna answered without hesitation, her scout's eye already sweeping the space. "It has human traces all over the place."
The monsters that lived inside the labyrinth proper weren't as sophisticated as the ones inside the dimensional subspaces. And none of them had ever seen a single monster enter a sanctuary. Not once across all the floors they had explored. They knew or at least understood that this seemed to be a consistent rule across all the labyrinths they had previously gone through. Sanctuaries were neutral ground. Safe ground.
But maybe this one wasn't the same. Maybe the rules here were different.
And if it wasn't a monster, then who was here?
They searched more thoroughly, combing through every corner. Then Torin noticed it. Some of their food stocks had dwindled. Supplies that had been at certain levels when they left were now measurably less. Someone had eaten. Someone had helped themselves to their stores.
The campfire had been recently lit as well. The ash was still warm beneath the surface.
But the question remained: by who? Or by what, at this point.
They searched every nook and cranny of the sanctuary. Behind the large stone outcroppings. Beneath the overhang near the back wall. Inside the alcoves where they stored their equipment.
Nothing. Nobody.
"This is getting creepy," Meredith said quietly, gripping her spear a little tighter. Her usual enthusiasm had been replaced with something uneasy.
"What if we're being hunted?" someone muttered from the back. "What if it's the spirits of the ones we lost?"
"Ghosts?" Kael said flatly, the former soldier's voice carrying its usual skepticism. "That's impossible. There's no such thing."
"Is it though?" another voice replied. Greaves, the older adventurer, spoke slowly. Deliberately. Like a man who had lived long enough to stop dismissing things he couldn't explain. "At this point, in this hellish place, is anything really impossible?"
Nobody answered that.
They all had assumptions. All had theories. But none of them had clear answers. The sanctum had been used. Someone had slept here, eaten their food, and vanished before they arrived. That was the only certainty.
They set a watch rotation and tried to rest. But it wasn't easy. The mystery of the unseen visitor sat heavy over the group like a second darkness.
Meanwhile, the subject of their confusion had long since gone. He had moved back to the first floor labyrinth before they ever made it to the third.
Benny had cleared some of the fog from his head, at least the worst of the darkness that had been steadily encroaching on his thoughts. Not fully. Never fully. But enough to see things with slightly sharper eyes. Enough to hold a coherent thought for more than a few seconds.
And now he could see clearly that the sanctuary he had been using carried fresh signs of life. Signs that hadn't been there before. The arrangement of certain things had shifted. Equipment placed with the care of people who had learned to be meticulous.
More than one person. Definitely more than one.
But the question for him was whether they were hostile or friendly. Did they know him? Did he know them from before this hazy fog of his memory started? Was there any connection there, or were they strangers?
He had questions with no answers. The same questions the group above him had: who was here, and were they safe?
He needed to prepare himself for a confrontation at the very least. He didn't know anything substantial yet. If it was human, then he might have some chance of talking to them. Of approaching without violence. That possibility felt strange, almost foreign to him. The idea of talking instead of killing.
But if it was an intelligent monster that could use the safety of a labyrinth sanctuary and mimic human traits, then that thing was both intelligent and dangerous. Something that could mimic a living human being down to the traces they left behind. That thought made his stomach turn in a way that combat never did.
His stomach churned, and something foul rose slightly through his throat. He swallowed it back down.
What would he do in either case? That he didn't know. His instinct was violence. His instinct was always violence now. But something else in him, something small and fragile and stubbornly persistent, hesitated at the thought of killing humans.
If they were human.
He sat on the cold stone of the first floor sanctuary and turned the problem over in his mind. The campfire before him crackled quietly. He stared into it without really seeing it.
He could wait and observe. Learn their patterns the same way he had learned the patterns of the monsters. Track them without being seen. Figure out what they were before deciding what to do with them.
That was the methodical approach. The smart approach.
But the other part of him, the hungry and restless part, wanted to just walk up there and find out the hard way.
He clasped his hands together and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. The fire popped and sent a shower of sparks upward.
Below him, separated by floors of stone and monster-filled corridors, eleven survivors lay awake in a sanctuary that smelled of someone else's presence. Wondering about the ghost that had been living in their safe space.
Above them, the ghost himself was wondering the same thing about them.
Two groups. One mystery. And sooner or later the distance between them would close. Whether that ended in blood or recognition or something else entirely was a question neither side had an answer to yet.
But the labyrinth, as it always did, would force their hands eventually. That was the nature of this place. It didn't let you avoid anything for long.
It always pushed you toward the thing you feared most.